The Good Doctor

At Taki’s Magazine, Dalrymple writes again about a man who is clearly one of his greatest influences, Dr. Johnson. If you know enough about both men, it is difficult to read this without having the same thoughts about Dalrymple:

He had a peculiar gift for saying things that were both startling and obvious. As he himself put it, we have more often to be reminded than informed. Although his prose style would no doubt strike many people (if they read it) as too formal—we prefer expletives and the demotic now—he says things that are strikingly apposite a quarter of a millennium after he wrote them. On practically every page of his essays, of which he wrote several hundred, scratched out with quill pen rather than merely tapped on keyboard onto a screen, you find things that are as true and pointed today as they were when he wrote them. I doubt that much of what we write will stand the same test in a further quarter millennium; but then it is the illusion of every age that it is having the last word.